The View From Booth 23

Posted on | August 25, 2009 | Comments Off on The View From Booth 23

What a weekend! I think I’m still processing a lot of what went on and what I learned. Overall, it was an incredible experience. It was really exciting to have so much of my work on display, and so many supportive friends came to see what I had been working on. All those friendly faces made a huge difference for me.

As you know, Marc and I were up bright and early on Saturday, loading the car and getting ready to go. So we packed everything up, motored across the bridge, and started setting up the tent around 8:30. We papered the peg boards so they looked cleaner and started putting in pegs. We felt pretty smart to have laid-out the panels for the tent the night before. Marc’s additional idea to take photos of the lay-out so we could review them in the camera reproduce them in the tent was right on. Once we had gotten to hanging paintings on the the fourth of six panels, though, it became obvious that I HAD FORGOTTEN FOUR PAINTINGS AT HOME. They were still on the floor, laid-out. Crap. Marc’s first response was to offer to drive home and get them. That was the perfect first response, by the way. But we decided the better course of action was to spread the remaining paintings out on the fifth and six panels and revisit the arrangement on Sunday.

I was very nervous for the festival to open. I didn’t need to be. One woman came within the first hour and bought two of my paintings. One big idea I have started to understand thanks to this weekend is that even though my style is still evolving, it is definitely a good thing for me to be out in the world and showing my work. I don’t have to be more “together” or accomplished than I am. There are people who like my paintings today. (What a concept!)

Some artists at the festival were rookies like me, and the seasoned participants were (for the most part) an incredible source of information. They offered suggestions on how to arrange the booth (like where to place the table, for example) and how to interact with the people who came by. And even the grumpy and abrasive artist who seemed to be doing everything possible to rattle my cage liked my idea for the drawing for the print.

All that said, I had light envy pretty much the whole weekend. Ark Row in Tiburon is pretty shady, and the tops of the tents kept sunlight out. And after I heard on Thursday evening how people had bought last minute lights for the 2008 festival, I was convinced that if I had lights in my tent, my foot traffic would have been better. I think that’s just the perfectionist talking, though, and it is probably not a fair assumption. More than half of us didn’t have lights. But if I do this again, I think I would like to use lights because, at a minimum, they would make me feel like the tent was warmer and more inviting.

On Sunday, we got to the tent a little bit later than we had on Saturday because most of the time-consuming work had already been done. We (intentionally) left home one huge painting and brought the Forgotten Four as well as my four panels that comprise the piece called “SF 2008.” That piece proved to be a great conversation starter. It turns out that collecting a year’s worth of Muni Fast Passes is more common than I would have thought. Plenty of people told me they kept theirs even though didn’t know what to do with them, and they loved the piece.